Gin and Tacoshttp://www.ginandtacos.com
PEACE IS OUR PROFESSIONThu, 08 Dec 2016 23:29:29 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.13932033BEYOND THE PALEhttp://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/12/08/beyond-the-pale/
http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/12/08/beyond-the-pale/#commentsThu, 08 Dec 2016 23:29:29 +0000http://www.ginandtacos.com/?p=8844So this is a weird post. Maybe you're familiar with all of these things already. But here are a few suggestions from one white liberal to another on how to dilute the painful whiteness of most of our internet reading experiences. I mean, I'm not going to say that opinions you enjoy reading are not valid if they come from someone who is the same as you in terms of demographics, but over the last few years I've made an effort (and due to the dominance of White Dudeness and White Feminism in the blogosphere, "effort" is an appropriate term) to make the perspectives I expose myself to a little less homogeneous. I am a white dude, I am more likely to Get other white dude humor, writing style, and perspective, and they are more likely to get mine. I don't think any of us need to apologize for that, but it's worth recognizing that we're looking into the mirror a lot when it comes to the perspectives we see online. Yeah, everyone gets their dose of Ta-Neshi Coates. Here's some other good stuff I've found that fits the product category, "Things a Gin and Tacos reader will probably like."

Yesterday I linked some Damon Young. You should read basically everything he says, including but not limited to VSB (Very Smart Brothas). I first became aware of this thanks to….

Luvvie Ajayi similarly has a best-selling book, an active FB community, and a website updated regularly with long-form stuff. The sense of humor is a little less twisted and more Normal Person compared to mine or the above Irby material, but I think it's still funny without being cornball or wandering into Wayne Brady / Dave Coulier territory.

Wain Bennett's Field Negro has one of my favorite comment sections on the internet. I've had people compare me to him in terms of willingness to go full R-rated in his writing. The assumption, though, is that if you're in for Gin and Tacos nothing over there will shock you much. People are very candid on that site.

Anyway, that's just a sample. The internet is cruel in a sense, there is always more good stuff than any one person can reasonably consume. But if you're looking to freshen up a stale set of daily reads, you could do worse than sampling a few of these.

]]>http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/12/08/beyond-the-pale/feed/118844NORMALIZED DEVIANCE CEASES TO BE DEVIANThttp://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/12/07/deviance/
http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/12/07/deviance/#commentsWed, 07 Dec 2016 23:24:52 +0000http://www.ginandtacos.com/?p=8841Sometimes I get lucky and by the time I can make words about something it turns out that other people already said what needs to be said. I found the widely circulated appearance of neo-fascist Barbie Tomi Lahren on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah deeply disturbing. Their exchange was not interesting and it went about as one might expect – imagine an internet comment section where someone tries over and over to get the head cheerleader from your high school to understand that maybe black and white people are not treated equally by society, without success, and you've seen everything the footage has to offer. Add in the predictably heavy emphasis on "dialogue" and "civility" and lots of laughs and smiles to show that we can all get along even if one of us thinks the other is subhuman and you end up with something out of a mushy centrist's wet dreams.

This is not OK. You can't have a civil Agree to Disagree conversation in that format with hardcore racists, or people who make their living making excuses for hardcore racism. Taking someone like Lahren, a troll from deep within the dark right wing internet thrust into the public eye because she's conventionally attractive, and presenting her in this way normalizes extreme beliefs in a way that is flatly dangerous. All this appearance did was offer free publicity to the smiley, perky face of white nationalism. This was a dream come true for Lahren, to be taken seriously and presented as a serious person with something useful to say. Neo-fascist cliques have been trying to find a way to attain that kind of mainstream legitimacy for decades, going to ridiculous extremes like trying to lure in kids with Nazi pop music. And now the mainstream media are doing it for them, for free, under false pretenses of objectivity. All Opinions Matter, right?

All worth reading. Everything I have to add would be redundant on that.

]]>http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/12/07/deviance/feed/208841THE HUMAN ELEMENT SEEMS TO HAVE FAILED US HEREhttp://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/12/05/the-human-element-seems-to-have-failed-us-here/
http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/12/05/the-human-element-seems-to-have-failed-us-here/#commentsMon, 05 Dec 2016 18:36:12 +0000http://www.ginandtacos.com/?p=8836As an obsessive consumer of books, movies, and TV from the Cold War era about living under the threat of nuclear annihilation, one thing that becomes apparent is that the fear of accidental apocalypse was easily as prominent (or, in the view of some scholars, more prominent than) as the fear that some madman bent on destroying the world would gain access to the Big Red Button. It was broadly recognized, particularly once the hydrogen bomb and the ICBM entered the picture in the early 1960s, that a nuclear war was not "winnable" and that even the evil, bloodthirsty Commie understood that well enough that no sane man would initiate one. Ivan knew that Uncle Sam was ready to hit him back hard enough to return the planet to the Stone Age, and both Eastern and Western political systems were robust enough (in their own very different ways) to prevent the elevation of the kind of lunatic who would say "Screw it, let's all die!" into a position of authority.

The biggest fear, then, was that once a massive apparatus of global annihilation was created humans would somehow lose control of it – that like a careless child who finds dad's gun, we would blow the planet up without intending to do so. On the American side, the heavy reliance on automation and seemingly half-crazed SAC Generals combined with the sheer size of the nuclear arsenal strained the ability of the civilian leadership to ensure that nothing happened that was not supposed to happen. For the Soviets, perversely, it was the lack of effective command and control, combined with the doddering character of their political leadership after Kruschchev, that raised the red flags (pun intended). That the world could come to an end because an American computer or a Soviet radio hookup from the 1930s malfunctioned was more plausible to most people than a cartoon villain President or General launching the missiles with a bloodthirsty laugh.

The most popular and in many ways best depiction of this fear in the arts is, of course, Dr. Strangelove:

Muffley: Well I assume then, that the planes will return automatically once they reach their failsafe points.

Turgidson: Well, sir, I'm afraid not. You see the planes were holding at their failsafe points when the go code was issued. Now, once they fly beyond failsafe they do not require a second order to proceed. They will fly until they reach their targets.

Muffley: Then why haven't you radioed the planes countermanding the go code?

Turgidson: Well, I'm afraid we're unable to communicate with any of the aircraft.

Muffley: Why?

Turgidson: As you may recall, sir, one of the provisions of plan R provides that once the go code is received the normal SSB radios in the aircraft are switched into a special coded device, which I believe is designated as CRM114. Now, in order to prevent the enemy from issuing fake or confusing orders, CRM114 is designed not to receive at all, unless the message is preceded by the correct three letter code group prefix.

Muffley: Then do you mean to tell me, General Turgidson, that you will be unable to recall the aircraft?

Turgidson: That's about the size of it. However, we are plowing through every possible three letter combination of the code. But since there are seventeen thousand permutations it's going to take us about two and a half days to transmit them all.

Muffley: How soon did you say the planes would penetrate Russian radar cover?

Turgidson: About eighteen minutes from now, sir.

This is, as we have already been reminded with the Taiwan Phone Call Crisis, the fear we once again have to live with as a nation. If for no other reason than self-interest, we can safely assume that Donald Trump does not actually want to get us all killed. The problem is that he's exactly the kind of person who would blunder into it. Shoot first – from the hip, naturally – and ask questions later. Act with an open disdain for forethought. Be "disruptive" and then let others rush in to clean up the mess you just made. This is, as the well worn saying goes, precisely how accidents happen. I'm not worried that Donald Trump wants to start a war. I'm worried that Donald Trump will start a war, at which point his intent will be irrelevant. That refusal to think about things he says and does that was pointed out throughout the campaign is not a bug. It's a feature. He states explicitly that he wants to be "unpredictable" in foreign policy. It doesn't take much imagination to envision how the infamously irony-deficient Chinese or Russian leadership are going to react to Diplomacy by Coked Up 3 AM Twitter Zinger.

"He wouldn't do that" is only reassuring inasmuch as the "he" in question is conscious of the potential consequences of his words and actions. Your dog doesn't want to knock over the glass perched on the edge of the kitchen table, but dammit if he doesn't do it every time he gets excited.

]]>http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/12/05/the-human-element-seems-to-have-failed-us-here/feed/558836YOU WERE HERE FIRSThttp://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/12/04/you-were-here-first/
http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/12/04/you-were-here-first/#commentsMon, 05 Dec 2016 03:53:43 +0000http://www.ginandtacos.com/?p=8832It's kind of ridiculous how many of the Everything is Terrible All the Time shirts you guys have ordered, but if you really want that "In on the ground floor" credibility when visiting your respective clurbs there are still a handful of the original Follow Me to the Clurb shirts and bumper stickers waiting for loving homes. Christmas is just around the corner.
]]>http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/12/04/you-were-here-first/feed/68832NPF: DOUBLING DOWN, APPROPRIATELY ENOUGHhttp://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/12/03/npf-doubling-down-appropriately-enough/
http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/12/03/npf-doubling-down-appropriately-enough/#commentsSat, 03 Dec 2016 19:07:44 +0000http://www.ginandtacos.com/?p=8830I haven't used the "Skip this" tag in over a year, so if it applies to you just bear with this post.

Gary Bettman has done a lot of good things for the NHL. When he became commissioner in 1993 the league was struggling to attract revenue beyond the gate (i.e., other than ticket sales) and it was a niche sport in the US on par with soccer or tennis. He thoroughly modernized the league, something even his biggest detractors admit, and in the process has probably been a net positive.

His Achilles Heel, though, has been the insistence on bringing hockey to the Sun Belt in the US. On paper it makes sense, although owners in 1993 were rightly incredulous. He had the foresight to point out how much of the US population would move to the Sun Belt, and his predictions came true. Unfortunately expanding to the Sun Belt has been a mixed bag at best because the fundamental premise – that Midwest / New England transplants to the South will want to see their favorite teams come to town for road games – is badly flawed. If the team can't build a local fan base because local fans simply don't care about hockey, the franchise is doomed. Atlanta lasted all of seven years. The Phoenix/Arizona Coyotes have been a ward of the league several times and don't attract flies to their expensive Glendale arena even though the team has been good recently, making the playoffs multiple times and even knocking off the 3-time Cup winning Blackhawks in 2011. Florida has been a basketcase / zombie franchise in a Miami market that could not care less about it for over 20 years now.

The two teams that succeeded in the Sun Belt – Tampa Bay and Nashville – did so because their ownership groups were intelligent enough not to rely on old fans coming to see their team on the road as a fan base. They both sustained huge short term losses by giving away tickets (especially to kids, knowing that the parents would have to come too) by the bushel. For every 10 free tickets, 1 person came and realized "Hey, I like this!" and they slowly built a local base. Having good teams helped a lot too (TB has won 1 Cup and runner-upped a second). So Bettman will, with some justification, point out that Sun Belt hockey can work.

And now he's doubling down on Las Vegas. Las Vegas is going to be a goddamn disaster. My suggestion on a popular hockey site for the team nickname (which ended up being the atrocious "Black Knights", as generic a name as you can find) was the Nordiques, because this team is going to be in Quebec in ten years or I'll eat my hat. Las Vegas has nothing that suggests it can ever support a pro sports team, and especially not hockey.

The obvious flaw in the Vegas market is that even the local population is transient. People, usually younger people, move to Vegas to work for a few years before burning out on the "Sin City" atmosphere and moving somewhere normal. It's not a place any sane person can take for very long. The other part of the population is retirees who are only going to care inasmuch as they can see the Bruins or Blackhawks come to town a couple times per year. It is beyond unlikely that a hockey team – assuming for a second that anyone in the desert even is predisposed to care about hockey – is going to build a strong local following in a place where the population is constantly churning.

They'll sell out in year one for the novelty factor – At the very least the league will strong arm casinos into gobbling up season tickets to give away for free – and I'm guessing that by the end of year two there will be more people on the ice than in the seats. Even if the team is good, which isn't likely given the expansion draft rules adopted last summer, this has all the makings of a non-starter.

Winnipeg's new team, the ex-Atlanta Thrashers, proves that when in doubt, NHL teams belong in Canada. Statistical analysis suggests that even though it is the 4th largest city in the US, Houston (pop. 6,500,000) has fewer people who like hockey enough to buy tickets than Saskatoon (pop. 260,000). Insiders were floored that Quebec City, with its billionaire ownership group willing to self-fund an arena and where the Nordiques (now Colorado Avalanche) are still missed, was not awarded an expansion team in favor of Vegas. Something tells me that they'll be getting their team soon enough. Despite the US/Canadian exchange rate issue, which Bettman blamed for the QC group's rejection, can't override the basic fact that people in Quebec will go to the games and nobody in Vegas will.

The worst outcome will be Bettman choosing to die on the hill of a Vegas franchise as he has stubbornly refused all attempts to relocate Phoenix or Florida despite them both being clear failures and money losers in their current markets. Bettman's getting old and he could decide to dig in his heels. But if 10% of the league's teams – 3 of 30 – are money losing Bettman pet projects, I think the owners are likely to rebel. So it's time for Hamilton and Quebec City to make sure that the local owners' groups and arena plans are ready to roll because this Vegas adventure is likely to be as short lived as it is poorly thought out.

]]>http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/12/03/npf-doubling-down-appropriately-enough/feed/188830WATCH AND LEARN THE ART OF THE DEAL, LIB-CUCKS!http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/11/29/the-art-of-the-deal-watch-and-learn/
http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/11/29/the-art-of-the-deal-watch-and-learn/#commentsWed, 30 Nov 2016 04:11:39 +0000http://www.ginandtacos.com/?p=8827And so the Master Negotiator, the man so skilled at making deals that his name is practically synonymous with wheeling and dealing, has struck again. He's not even in the White House yet and already he managed to convince Carrier to keep a medium-sized factory in Indianapolis open. Does this guy know how to talk people into doing what he wants or what??

Wait.

"Incentives." The deal involves "incentives." So like, he walked into a meeting with their people and said, "If you stay I will give you this bag of money. The money is not mine, but I have the power to give it to you. Giving it to you costs me literally nothing." Then they said "OK, we will let you give us this big bag of free money"?

Those fabled Trump negotiating skills really are a thing to behold. I don't think there's anyone else alive who could have made this deal, taking a big bag of free tax money and handing it to a major defense contractor in exchange for a lukewarm promise to keep 700 Indiana factory workers employed for a little while longer. This is more incredible than when the Dutch swindled the Indians out of Manhattan.

What. A. Deal.

]]>http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/11/29/the-art-of-the-deal-watch-and-learn/feed/1168827HOW AM I BETTER AT THIS THAN YOU AREhttp://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/11/27/how-am-i-better-at-this-than-you-are/
http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/11/27/how-am-i-better-at-this-than-you-are/#commentsMon, 28 Nov 2016 02:23:33 +0000http://www.ginandtacos.com/?p=8824It has been more than 15 years since I gave up on American conservatism, but since it represented a big change in my (at that time young) life I still remember much of the process quite clearly. Two things in particular were the deciding factors for me. One, I watched the Southern wing of the party slowly become dominant and it made no sense to me why anyone would take policy cues from and submit to the leadership of people representing the absolute worst parts of the country. "Do we really want to make the country more like Mississippi? Why?" was a question I asked a lot and never got a satisfactory answer. The second tipping point (Is it possible to have two of those?) was the realization that the American definition of conservatism is like the American definition of mayonnaise – it would not be recognized as such anywhere else in the world. American conservatives are not conservatives. Their ideology is better described as either nationalism, anti-government-ism, or some combination of the two.

The fundamental principle of conservatism in political history is, in my view, the defense of the institutions of government (or, as some people argue more expansively, society as a whole). This implies the utmost respect for the rule of law and the constitutional process. Republicans, however, gave up any pretense of that during the 80s and 90s. While I would never describe myself as a conservative (because people would interpret that incorrectly), I still believe that adherence to the power-sharing arrangements of our system of government takes precedence over anything else in the political arena. Without that foundation, we have a system of majority rule that is wide open to manipulation and abuse of power.

Defense of political institutions is necessary because without it, people lose sight of the necessity of the same. When faith in the institutions of government disappears, people are seduced by all manner of nonsense in its place. They might even, hypothetically, react favorably to authoritarian appeals to give one individual the power to act as he pleases without the constraints of any rules or institutional checks and balances. What we see today is nothing more than the logical end result of forty years of telling people that government is evil, rotten, and the obstacle between America and Greatness. How many times can people be told that government is the problem in their lives before they conclude that it serves no purpose that they can see?

American conservatives gave up long ago on defending our institutions. If the Supreme Court makes a decision they don't like, they shit all over the Supreme Court. If the president is not a Republican, they slander him as illegitimate. Any law they do not author is a direct attack on the Republic and its humble, freedom-loving citizens. If they do not win an election, then the election was rigged. Is any of this sounding familiar? Somehow the American left became better at the traditional role of conservatives than conservatives themselves. Al Gore had to be the one to go on TV in 2000 and tell the country that we are obligated to respect decisions of our institutions even when they are obviously riddled with problems.

The Republicans have been living dangerously with their new, nihilistic take on the role of government for years. Despite constant references to their love of the Constitution, they've encouraged Americans to look the other way for the sake of advancing their own agenda. But now it appears that the mood they cultivated has gotten out of their control and they've no longer control their own party. They've been taken over by a con man / publicity hound who doesn't even want to do the job he was elected for. Republicans needed to hawk the importance of the rule of law just enough to maintain control of the institutions they used to acquire or maintain power. But they pushed it too far, like the thief who keeps coming back for one last big heist over and over until he ends up in cuffs. "I should have walked away when I had the chance" summarizes what a lot of Republicans must be feeling today, even if they don't verbalize it and on paper they control all of the levers of governing. They know now that what they have are majorities, not control.

Now the Republican Party is under the control of someone who doesn't even pay lip service to institutions and the rule of law, which is the final nail in the coffin of any meaningful claim to the term "conservative." Token shows of backbone during the election have been replaced by a parade of Republicans into audiences with their new master, groveling for favor and a whiff of the spoils. It isn't the racism and nationalism that means that the GOP is now officially an authoritarian movement; the giveaway is the eagerness with which they embrace government by Big Man, not to be inconvenienced by anything as insignificant as the rule of law getting between America and greatness.

]]>http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/11/27/how-am-i-better-at-this-than-you-are/feed/708824THE NEXT BEST THING, CONT.http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/11/21/the-next-best-thing-cont/
http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/11/21/the-next-best-thing-cont/#commentsTue, 22 Nov 2016 03:23:59 +0000http://www.ginandtacos.com/?p=8821So, I don't do this often but yesterday's post and its Facebook cousin spawned an unusually large number of useful comments. I thought I would follow up by addressing two of them here.

First, there was criticism of the idea of writing off a lot of rural and remote urban areas rather than reinvesting in them. That sounds good, but it fails to account for many of the reasons these places were 'de-invested' in the first place. Who exactly is going to do this investing now? We're talking about places that suffer from poor location, poor quality of life, urban decay, poverty, and a potential workforce generally lacking in relevant skills. What exactly is going to bring investment to Decatur, IL or Muncie, IN when there are better, more convenient locations nearby like Indianapolis or Chicago? The company executives don't want to live in the middle of nowhere with a workforce riddled with problems ranging from low skill levels to the associated negative side effects of poverty (crime, drug abuse, lack of support networks, etc).

Tax cuts and incentives, right? Just offer enough tax cuts and incentives that some business will want to locate there. Again, that works in theory. The problem in reality is that you can throw a dart at the U.S. map now and hit a location where state and local officials will shower you, a potential employer, with free public money in the form of incentives, rebates, breaks, and infrastructure improvements. The Decaturs of the world have no competitive advantage. The company can get the same lavish treatment from vastly better locations, particularly in the South. Tax incentives are kind of a collective action problem; if a few places offer it, then it achieves the desired goal. If everyone does it, everyone loses.

The economy as a whole has enough problems across the region that a business could reap plenty of freebies locating near Chicago, 20 minutes from the world's busiest airport, 45 minutes from Lake Michigan shipping, and with a college educated or otherwise skilled workforce numbering in the millions to pick from. Oshkosh and Anderson and Lima can't compete with their nearby, economically stronger neighbors. The only businesses left in the more remote Rust Belt outposts are only there because elected officials throw such an insane amount of public money at them – far beyond any amount that makes economic sense – that it would cost more to leave Moline than to stay. The incentives game is an arms race, and eventually the smaller players have to go nuclear to "win."

Could the government be The Investor? Say, investing massively in infrastructure in these areas to give them a boost? In theory, yes. The political will to do so appears to be lacking, and the rational case for building up the infrastructure of economically dying places experiencing population aging and decline really need new roads and bridges. From the point of view of an elected official, this will have the odor of a Dig Hole, Fill Hole project. A new highway isn't going to bring Youngstown an economic revival, so falling into the trap of investing in new infrastructure continuously just to keep the place afloat is a real danger. Of all the proposed solutions, though, this is probably the most realistic. It has at least some chance of happening, although it remains unlikely with Republicans in control of Congress.

The second major point was that a revival of pro-labor, anti-Capitalist Greed rhetoric once held great appeal to the white working class and could therefore be a viable strategy moving forward. All I can say is…it's possible. It's not IMpossible. It's very difficult to see how that idea takes root at this point, though. The culture wars, the free markets = free people delusion, and the general lurch toward the right over the past three-plus decades are pretty firmly entrenched. We are at the point where the two "sides" of the political debate aren't even speaking the same language and have their own versions of reality.

There aren't enough young people in the most troubled Rust Belt areas to make that work, in my view. I may be wrong. But one of the worst problems the region deals with is the continual skill drain. Young people and people with marketable skills or motivation get out as soon as they can, and the population left behind is largely older, poorer, less skilled, and more resistant to change. As I understand it, building a labor movement relies on turning workers into activists for their own self-interest, and that's hard to do when you bring the idea to a city full of laid-off ex-assembly line workers in their mid-50s or older. I don't know – perhaps the world's greatest orator, leader, and organizer is out there and can find some way to pull that off. He or she will deserve all the praise that follows from accomplishing that. But I think a very natural impediment to labor organizing in these already severely depressed areas is that a lot of the younger workers who would be most involved in the movement are gone, long since having loaded up the moving van and headed somewhere less bleak.

In any event, the comments on this one were unusually numerous and good. I know defeatism is not a popular ideology, and it's possible that I project way too much of my own take on living in one of these places from experience. That said, I don't think the optimistic view can fail to account for the limitations inherent to the ideas mentioned here. It could work, but it's awfully easy to make the Devil's Advocate argument for why it will not.

]]>http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/11/21/the-next-best-thing-cont/feed/1258821THE NEXT BEST THINGhttp://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/11/20/the-next-best-thing/
http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/11/20/the-next-best-thing/#commentsMon, 21 Nov 2016 04:50:59 +0000http://www.ginandtacos.com/?p=8818If I have to listen to one more Brooklyn- or DC- or Bay Area-dwelling Hot Take artist explain that Democrats lost this election because they didn't do enough for (or pay enough attention to) Rust Belt, low-education white people I am going to put my foot through…I don't know, Ezra Klein's head. Post-election narratives rarely do more than provide an oversimplified explanation – in the form of a conveniently untestable hypothesis – but in some cases they actively distort the truth.

Explain exactly how the Democratic Party wrote off white Rust Belt voters. By trying to make sure they had health care access when their employers stopped offering benefits? By supporting unions that might actually provide them some job security or wages over $10/hr? By supporting and trying to increase minimum wage? By trying to protect the social safety net, including unemployment benefits and workers comp, that Republicans have been hacking away at for decades? That's an odd definition of "ignored." The implication that if only the Democrats had worked a little harder these voters would have been satisfied is ridiculous.

Of course the counterargument is that trade agreements made in the 1990s with the blessing of Bill Clinton are a major cause of manufacturing job losses. This is true, although it conveniently ignores that Clinton was almost the only Democrat willing to back an idea the Republican Party brought to the table. Why are the Republicans not the ones culpable for NAFTA, if this narrative makes any sense?

The entire Trump movement is about anger, and in truth it is easy to understand why these people are angry. I live in the Rust Belt. I have spent all but a sliver of my life here. Outside of a small number of major cities that have weathered the storm (but have their own serious problems) economically, people live in small towns or minor cities that have declined steadily since 1960. People who have spent long lives in these places remember when things used to be better – when the city wasn't half-empty, when there were enough jobs, when the jobs that were available didn't pay squat with terrible benefits, and when the side effects of poverty and neglect hadn't turned the physical city into a decent setting for a modern post-apocalypse film. They are mad and they have a reason to be mad.

The reality is, the version of their communities that they remember is NEVER coming back. It's not. It's gone. It's never coming back because we cannot recreate the context that allowed it to happen – a post-World War II environment in which the U.S. was the sole industrial power on the planet that wasn't teetering on collapse and / or reduced to rubble. Eventually the rest of the world caught up, and we felt the beginning of the decline in the 1970s. The embrace of neoliberal trade policy in the Reagan and post-Reagan years only accelerated trends that were already established. All the while the GOP didn't lift a finger to ameliorate any of this. They offered tax cuts (which would magically create jobs, but didn't) and helpful reminders that if you're poor it's because you don't work hard enough.

These places are dead and dying because economically there is no longer any reason for them to exist. They were established at a time when their location near resources or now-outdated transportation links made them important. Now, and no politician will ever admit it in public, there simply isn't any reason for Altoona or Youngstown or Terre Haute to exist anymore. The jobs are never coming back. Nothing is coming back. The Democrats have not given the white Rust Belt working class an answer to their problems because there is no answer. Nothing will resurrect these places, all of which have long since crossed the point of no return in their economic and population decline. Automation, union-busting, outsourcing (much of it within the U.S., to impoverished Southern states) and race-to-the-bottom subsidy wars among state and local governments are ensuring that the situation isn't about to improve.

And here's the kicker: Trump didn't offer any solutions either. All he did was offer them something to blame. They liked hearing someone lie to their faces and promise that the jobs are coming back, and they liked even more having someone tell them that it's OK to direct all their anger at the people they don't like anyway: the immigrants, the Hispanics, the urban poor (the rural poor are still virtuous, of course), the gays, the liberals, the youths who can't wait to turn 18 and get out, the academics, the media who don't tell them what they want to hear…you name it. That's all Trump did. He pointed at the scapegoats and promised that he would make it OK to direct anger and scorn toward them.

The false narrative implies that the problem of the Midwestern white working class is solvable. It isn't, short of a time machine that can take us back to 1953. It further implies that Trump offered some kind of solution that Democrats are too pompous or too inarticulate to offer. This is a half-truth; Trump didn't offer any answers beyond vague, empty Strongman promises that he will reverse economic reality by the force of his personality alone. He offered them a distraction and an ironclad promise that if their lives aren't going to improve – and they won't – at least they can content themselves with lashing out at a convenient list of people who are somehow Different and therefore deserving of scorn under any circumstances.

Given that reality, the Democrats' failure was in not offering a scapegoat. Maybe it's time to dust off the Joe Hill / Mother Jones / Eugene Debs playbook. If scapegoating is the only thing that wins these people over, then the best strategy is to point them in the right direction again and remind them that Capital is the enemy of Labor. End the worship of and fixation with Job Creators and the idea that the boss is your buddy and your role in the economy is a matter of personal responsibility, fully within one's own control.

Is that going to work? Doubtful. Racism is an easier, more effective play. Anything that requires people to think is going to lose out to anything that plays directly into their basest prejudices. I don't know how you beat the path of least resistance. The older I get, the less I believe that is possible.

]]>http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/11/20/the-next-best-thing/feed/1148818THE LETDOWNhttp://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/11/15/the-letdown/
http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/11/15/the-letdown/#commentsWed, 16 Nov 2016 03:34:37 +0000http://www.ginandtacos.com/?p=8815Given that the Clinton campaign was defined throughout this interminable election by its inability to get potential supporters anywhere near as fired up as they had been for candidates like Obama or Bernie Sanders, the torrent of emotions that came pouring out of Clinton voters last Tuesday and Wednesday is, in a vacuum, surprising. I saw adults literally weep. Is it possible that anyone could be that broken up over missing out on four to eight years of centrist, lukewarm New Democrat "I've got it! Civil unions!" horseshit? Are there people in the world at this moment who are legitimately crushed that America will miss out on the Hillary Clinton presidency?

Of course there aren't. OK, maybe a handful. The narrative has said that the sadness that overwhelmed so many people in the wake of this election had nothing at all to do with Hillary Clinton and everything to do with fear of a Trump presidency. Clinton eerily paralleled the Kerry / Edwards campaign in the end, making a persuasive case for why the Republican opponent is terrible but offering nothing to recommend themselves beyond "We're really experienced! I've been in Washington forever!" and essentially expecting voters to motivate themselves out of sheer terror. Indeed, many people (particularly people who don't happen to be white, male, or white and male) did so.

Even the Fear of a Trump Planet narrative doesn't explain the powerful emotions that the election brought out of so many people. I'm as bad at reading minds as the next person, but what I hear when friends, strangers, students, random internet commenters, and media figures talk about this election is a shattering sense of disappointment. Not in Hillary Clinton, who was little more than a cipher, but in the people around us. In the people who voted for That Man. It is not too extreme to say that for a lot of voters, particularly younger ones, the outcome on Tuesday seriously shook their faith in…well, mankind.

Many people subscribe to a school of thought called "optimism," or so I'm told, and they like to believe that their fellow man is fundamentally good. They believe that when presented with a racist demagogue who does not even go through the motions of pretending like he has a plan or knows what he is doing, they will not fall for it. Being people of character and decency, they will say "This charlatan is offensive in every way and we should be embarrassed even to be considering him." People would like to believe that the American public could not elevate to the White House a candidate who is openly racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic, because that would imply that millions of the people we share this society with are those three things or at least possessing sufficient moral cowardice to overlook those qualities in a candidate.

On Tuesday, all of us alike learned that, yes, America is – pick one – worse than we hoped or as bad as we suspected. We learned that 61,000,000 American adults eligible to vote, essentially half of the electorate, signed off on a man with zero experience (governing or otherwise), a child's temper, the attention span of a fly, and without any substance to his rhetoric that would not be familiar to someone who has studied the speeches of Mussolini or Franco. Yes, we know our institutions are strong. Yes, we know there are checks and balances. But even if a Trump presidency is nowhere near as bad as many expect or predict, nothing will ever change the fact that the man our fellow citizens voted for was the racist demagogue. As I said weeks ago, this election has done lasting damage. It doesn't matter at this point if Trump moves to the center and becomes the wisest, most enlightened statesman in history – we all saw how they cheered when banged the xenophobic drums, we all saw the crowds wink and cheer when he talked about "certain areas" and "certain people," we saw them act like a colorized film of an old fascist rally when he barked about "Law and Order", we all saw the "Lock the bitch up" shirts, we all saw them worked into a frenzy when he talked about killing and torturing, we all heard them chanting, we all saw them make excuses for every horrendous thing he has said and done. Nothing can undo that.

That's why people cried on Wednesday and on Election night. Nobody gives a shit about Hillary Clinton, and the fact that we are in the current predicament casts that fact in high relief. But we wanted to believe that our neighbors, our families, our fellow citizens were better than this, and now we can't. We know now going forward that we can never give the people we share this country with the benefit of doubt or tell ourselves that they are kind, decent people who could Never Do Such Things. We have seen them do it. We know better now. It is not a pretty thing to see when hope dies and is replaced by hard, cold mental armor.